Our second goal in the development of XOBIS was to create a structure that we believe will improve access to and navigation through the library database. One might think of our efforts as an attempt to normalize library data into more discreet units of information. These units can then be related to each other through explicit relationships.
While we believe the structure is sound, we have not explored some of the more complex, exotic MARC note fields. Still, in developing XOBIS, we worked from the assumption that any note with a multitude of subfields should be expressed as a relationship. Whether some MARC notes embed more than one relationship within a single MARC field remains to be seen.
It is XOBIS' goal to represent the full spectrum of library information in a relatively simple schema. We are not aiming to be a subset of MARC data.
We treat many components of the MARC record as relationships; those that aren't seem to fit well as Notations. Whether domain specific notes, currently included in MARC, should be in XOBIS is a question we are still entertaining.